Talk with building residents to follow up on the health and welfare inspection findings. Check if there are other respiratory issues for residents.
Follow-up to make sure that the building maintenance personnel have changed filters and spare parts in the building environmental systems.
Review medical records and intervention methods. Make sure that medications are current and that medical therapies are in order, including the Advair (disk), Albuteral (inhaler) and Fluticasone (nasal spray) and a review records of health-seeking behavior exhibited by Navy members ("Comprehensive family assessment," 2011)
A follow up health and welfare inspection will be conducted in a month to measure the effectiveness of the intervention. At the inspection, the commander will fill out a checklist to report to the Troop Medical Clinic on the results. Success will be measured as the significant reduction of dust mites, fungi and other contaminants in the air, monthly changing and the successful fulfillment of medical orders for affected personnel.
Some side effects of the intervention will be both positive and negative. It will make enemies and fewer friends. Certainly, the increased cleanliness of the enlisted permanent party headquarters will make the asthma suffers happy. It will not make sailors happy who feel that this is an unnecessary invasion of privacy. Building maintenance personnel will probably resent having to change filters more often.
Certainly, the risks of being a serviceman at Great Lakes Naval Base are much less than elsewhere. However, medical risks are risks, no matter how small and the military has to do something to alleviate them in the name of good order, discipline and morale of the fighting force (Frese, & Harrell, 2003, 92).
More involved ethnographic assessments have been conducted to improve the quality of respiratory health among children in Ecuador. Ethnomedicine will help us build explanatory models of episodes. It will also provide us with a number of low-cost, effective methods that the residents themselves can employ to improve environmental health conditions with regard to respiratory...
By understanding these episodes, we can better combat environmental factors that contribute to induced asthma. While Great Lakes Naval Base is certainly not lacking in resources to combat asthma, prevention is always the best way to go. In this vein, there are things that the personnel can do on their own to alleviate environmental contributing causes to cases of asthma in base housing.
In the case of the Ecuadoran models, a number of maternal health care-seeking indicators for children under
five of age were observed with acute respiratory infections (ARI) in n Penipe
. Attending to the outside environment and making sure that it was clean and breatheable was one of the first issues. Secondly, seeking out quick medical intervention was another (Luque, 2006, 163-165). Thirdly, palliative methods such as herb teas and cough syrups aided in dealing the symptoms of the asthma and kept it from getting worse (ibid, 206).
While all of the above intervention methods may seem like common sense, they are effective and contribute greatly to community health. Bad living conditions that are the result of the quick-paced and bad American life style may be tolerable in a civilian context. However, given the mission of the military, it needs to have all of its members healthy and at maximum readiness. Given this unique situation, institutions like the Navy need to take extraordinary measures to maintain the health and welfare of its personnel. In this way, the mission can be achieved.
Works Cited
Comprehensive family assessment process. (2011). Retrieved from http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/pubs/family_assessment/fa4.htm.
Frese, P.R., & Harrell, M.C. (2003). Anthropology and the United States military: coming of age in the twenty-first century . New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan.
Secnavinst 5300.28d asn (m&ra) secnav instruction 5300.28d. (2005, December 5).
Retrieved from doni.daps.dla.mil/Directives/../05../5300.28D.pdfSimilar.
Veteran disability compensation. (2011). Retrieved from http://www.military.com/benefits/military-pay/va-disability-compensation.
